Cheney: Trump contacted witness
Jan. 6 panel traces extremists’ route to riot at US Capitol
WASHINGTON — Abruptly raising the question of witness tampering, the Jan. 6 committee revealed Tuesday that Donald Trump had attempted to contact a person who was talking to the panel about its investigation of the former president and the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. She said the committee had notified the Justice Department.
The person Trump tried to contact declined to answer or respond to his call, Cheney said. Instead the person alerted their lawyer who contacted the committee.
The disclosure by Cheney was not the first time the panel has raised concerns about witnesses being contacted by Trump’s team in ways that could reflect or at least create the appearance of inappropriate influence.
The hearing
Tuesday was the seventh for the Jan.
6 committee. Over the past month, the panel has created a narrative of a defeated Trump “detached from reality,” clinging to false claims of voter fraud and working feverishly to reverse his election defeat.
It all culminated with the attack on the Capitol, the committee says.
Tuesday’s session revealed details of an “unhinged” late-night meeting at the White House with Donald Trump’s outside lawyers suggesting the military seize state voting machines in a last-ditch effort to pursue his false claims of voter fraud before the defeated president summoned a mob to the Capitol.
The committee investigating last year’s attack is working to show how far-right extremists answered Trump’s call to come for a big rally in Washington. As dozens of lawsuits and his claims of voter fraud fizzled, Trump met late into the night of Dec. 18 with attorneys at the White House
before tweeting the rally invitation — “Be there, will be wild!” Members of the Proud
Boys and Oath Keepers groups are now facing rare sedition charges over the siege.
“This tweet served as a call to action — and in some cases a call to arms.” said one panel member, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla.
The panel also showed an undated draft tweet that showed that Trump had plans well in advance to tell his supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6. The tweet, which was never sent, said “Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!”
The panel featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, recalling the explosive meeting at the White House when Trump’s outside legal team brought a draft executive order to seize states’ voting machines — a “terrible idea,” he said.
“That’s not how we do things in the
United States,” Cipollone testified.
Another aide called the meeting “unhinged.”
Cipollone and other White House officials scrambled to intervene in the late-night meeting Trump was having with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired national security aide Michael Flynn and the head of the online retail company Overstock. It erupted in shouting and screaming, another aide testified.
“Where is the evidence?” Cipollone demanded of the false claims of voter fraud.
“What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts,” testified another White House official, Eric Herschmann.
But Trump was intrigued and essentially told his White House lawyers that at least Powell and outside allies were trying to do something.
“You guys are not tough enough,” Giuliani in video testimony recalled the president telling the White House attorneys.
As night turned to morning, Trump tweeted the call for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, when Congress would be tallying the Electoral College results. Immediately, the extremists reacted. The panel showed graphic and violent text messages and played videos of right-wing figures, including Alex Jones, and others laying out that Jan. 6 would be the day they fight for the president.
In vulgar and often racist language the messages beaming across the far-right forums planned for the big day that they said Trump was asking for in Washington.
It would be a “red wedding,” said one, a reference to mass killing. “Bring handcuffs.”
At the witness table to testify in person was Jason Van Tatenhove, an ally of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes.
Another witness was Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last month to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building.
Ayres has said that on Jan. 2, 2021, he posted an image stating that Trump was “calling on us to come back to Washington on January 6th for a big protest.”
The committee is probing whether the extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and QAnon adherents who had rallied for Trump before, coordinated with White House allies for Jan. 6.
The Oath Keepers have denied there was any plan to storm the Capitol.